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Vanishing
Voices

Johnny Hill, Jr., of Parker, Arizona,

is one of the last speakers of
Chemehuevi, an endangered Native
American language: Its like a bird
losing feathers. You see one float by,
and there it goesanother word gone.

track 2-08

The earThs populaTion of seven billion people

speaks roughly 7,000 languages today. However,
there is a very unequal distribution in the number
of people who speak these languages. In fact, just
85 of them are spoken by 78 percent of the worlds
population, while the least common 3,500 languages
are spoken by just 8.25 million people, combined. So
while there are roughly 330 million native speakers
of English and 845 million speakers of Mandarin,
there are only 235,000 speakers of Tuvan, the native
language of the Republic of Tuva in the Russian
Federation. And there are fewer than 2,000 known

speakers of Aka, a language from Arunachal Pradesh

in northeastern India.

Many of these smaller languages are at risk of

disappearing. More than 1,000 are listed as critically
or severely endangered. In fact, it is estimated that
a language dies every 14 days. Linguists think that,
within the next century, nearly half of the worlds
current languages may disappear as communities
abandon native tongues in favor of English,
Mandarin, or Spanish. But should we be concerned
about language extinction? And what can we do to
prevent it?
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Northwest Pacific
Plateau
The Northwest Pacific Plateau
comprising British Columbia
(Canada), Washington, Oregon,
Idaho, and Montana (USA)is one
of the most endangered language
hot spots on the planet. Too few
children and young adults speak
the indigenous 6 languages in the
U.S. portion of this region. Many
speakers are abandoning their native
languages for English. The Canadian
organization First Voices is one of
many efforts to save the indigenous
languages of the Pacific Northwest
region. One of First Voices services is
providing online materials and games
to help people learn and practice the
disappearing languages in this region.

northwest
Pacific
Plateau

oklahomasouthwest

northern
south America

mesoamerica

Language
Hot spots:
Hot spots are places where
many languages are
disappearing.

Western
Africa

Central
south America

southern
south America

How Do Languages Die?

D
The 235,000 speakers of Tuvan, such as this man and
boy at the National Museum of Tuva, believe the past
is ahead of them while the future lies behind. Their
word for the future (songgaar) means to go back; the
past (burungaar) means to go forward.

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From the beginning of human communication

systems, languages have appeared and disappeared.
The languages of powerful groups have spread while
the languages of smaller cultures have disappeared.
One linguist, attempting to define what a language
is, famously (and humorously) said that a language
is a dialect1 with an army. Today, power may take
less obvious formstelevision, the Internet, and
international businessbut the effects are similar.
In an increasingly globalized age, languages
spoken in remote places are no longer protected from
the languages that dominate world communication
and commerce. Languages such as Mandarin, English,
Russian, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic reach into tiny
communities and compete with smaller languages.
When one language dominates, children from non1

A dialect is a form of a language that is spoken in a particular

area or by a particular group.

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Australia

Central
siberia

Eastern
siberia

Caucasus
southeast
Asia

estern
ica

Eastern india
& malaysia
Eastern
melanesia

Eastern
Africa

Western
melanesia
EnDAngERED
LAngUAgEs
sEVERE
HigH

southern
Africa

northern
Australia

mEDiUm
LoW

tribe, appear to have no words for numbers, but instead,

they get by with relative words such as few and many. This
suggests that assigning numbers may be an invention of
culture rather than an innate3 part of human cognition.4
The interpretation of color is similarly varied from
language to language. What we think of as the natural
spectrum of the rainbow is actually divided up differently
in different tongues, with many languages having more or
fewer color categories than their neighbors.

dominant language groups tend to lose their native

languages as they grow up, attend school, and enter the
workforce. Sometimes there is disapproval of the smaller
languages, partly because of a perception that speaking
these languages presents a barrier to success. These
attitudes, along with the strong desire to conform,
undermine2 the survival of native languages. Political
pressure can further affect the survival of smaller
languages, such as when governments pass laws that
promote dominant languages, and ban the use of smaller
languages in education or the media.

Why Should We Be
Concerned?

Why is the extinction of a language with a small

number of speakers a concern? Different languages
express different ways of seeing the world. They carry
information such as the values, history, traditions, and
institutions of a culture, and they can show us how a
particular culture experiences basic concepts such as
time, numbers, and colors. The Pirah, an Amazonian

Many Aboriginal languages in

Australia have been lost already;
more will soon follow. Aboriginal
groups are small and scattered7
because of a history of conflict
with white settlers. 8 European
English speakers dominated the
land, and as a result, Aboriginal
groups have struggled to maintain
their own languages and cultures.
Researchers for the Enduring
Voices Project are making possibly
the last ever recordings of some
of these Aboriginal languages.
For example, Enduring Voices
researchers have recorded a woman
who may be the very last speaker
of an Aboriginal language called
Djawi.

The disappearance of a language also deprives us

of knowledge no less valuable than some future miracle
drug5 that may be lost when a species goes extinct.
2

If you undermine something, you make it less strong or less secure

than it was before.

An innate quality or ability is one that a person is born with.

Cognition is the mental process involved in knowing, learning, and

understanding things.

A miracle drug is a treatment for a disease that is surprisingly effective

and safe.

indigenous people or things belong to the country in which they

are found.

scattered people or things are spread over an area in an irregular way.

settlers are people who go to live in a new country.

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mention information about the history and survival

skills of many of the worlds cultures. In Micronesia,
for example, there are sailors who can navigate
thousands of miles in uncharted ocean without any
modern equipment. Their skills and knowledge,
however, is encoded in small, vulnerable languages.

Bringing Languages
Back to Life

The Seri have more than 50 terms for family

relationships, such as between these two cousins.
The word atcz means daughter of a parents younger
sibling; azaac means daughter of a parents
older sibling.

For example, the Seri, who live in the western Sonoran

Desert of Mexico, have terms for more than 300
desert plants. By studying the Seri language, scientists
learned about an unknown yet highly nutritional food
source similar to wheat, called eelgrass. Seri words
related to local animals have also helped scientists
acquire new information about these animals habitats
and behaviors. However, there are only 650 to 1,000
Seri speakers, and the disappearance of the language
might therefore deprive us of important scientific
knowledge.
If languages continue to vanish at todays rapid
rate, we may lose knowledge about plants that could
someday lead to an invaluable medicine, not to

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Fortunately, organizations around the world are

working to revitalize9 threatened languages. These
efforts involve increasing opportunities for people
to use the endangered languages and reversing
the attitudes that caused people to abandon them.
One effort to preserve disappearing languages is
the Enduring Voices Project. This project works to
identify language hot spots, places on the planet with
languages that are unique and quickly disappearing.
Enduring Voices selects hot spots based on the
language diversity of a region and on the level of
endangerment of the language. The goal of the
Enduring Voices Project is to accurately document
the languages of these places, and to record the
cultural information they contain.
Projects such as Enduring Voices are extremely
important to the survival of disappearing languages.
Their efforts and the work of other language
preservationists10 will allow us to pass on a wealth
of historical, cultural, and scientific knowledge to
future generations. As Enduring Voices team member
K. David Harrison says, It would be incredibly
shortsighted for us [ . . . ] to think that because we
have put men on the moon and split the atom11 [that]
we have nothing to learn from people who just a
generation ago were hunter-gatherers12 in a remote
wilderness. What they knowwhich weve forgotten
or never knewmay someday save us.
To revitalize something means to make it active or healthy again.
Preservationists are people who make sure a situation or a
condition remains as it is.
11
To split the atom is to reduce an atom into even smaller parts.
12
Hunter-gatherers are people who live by hunting and collecting
food rather than by farming.
9

10

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